Nexus Market FAQ

Whichever of the three onions on the mirrors page your Tor circuit reaches first. They’re interchangeable, same back-end, same login, same balance. The address at the top of the home page is the primary one. The full set:

nexusb2l73qzjn4slhyfxa3jvpolw7fomiz5sgyyefnsdhikaqgborqd.onion

nexusabcdrwy7632jfmkfu3f6u7usyw2xn2mcfiljunz6zsj4p5vioqd.onion

nexuspokkxp4ayqqec3c3lkekwhnjdqur5bqiocemx4t6sy3werqihad.onion

Three checks. (1) Compare the full 56-character 56-character fingerprint against the operator’s detached-PGP-signed announcement on Dread. (2) Compare the canonical onion in the page banner against your address bar after the marketplace loads. (3) Check the fingerprint embedded in the login captcha image. Partial-prefix matches (first 8–12 characters identical) aren’t verifications, phishers run vanity-key generation specifically to match prefixes.

They don’t change as often as you might think, rotations are pressure-driven, not scheduled. When an address comes under sustained DDoS the operator may retire it and bring up a replacement; when the pool drops below three the operator tops it up. Cadence is roughly every few weeks per operator. The mirrors page on this site is updated whenever a new signed announcement appears.

Bitcoin, Litecoin and Monero, all settled natively on-site (no third-party conversion bridges). Monero is the privacy default and what the marketplace expects you’ll use without a specific reason to pick something else. Bitcoin is accepted for vendor compatibility, some vendors haven’t moved on. Litecoin is the practical option for small deposits where Bitcoin network fees would dominate the order.

Not as far as we’re aware. The marketplace has been continuously reachable since late 2023, the operator publishes signed mirror announcements, the escrow flow is conventional multisig with documented dispute resolution, and we haven’t seen the kind of operator misbehaviour (silently retained balances, ignored disputes, unexplained downtime) that precedes an exit scam. That said: never keep more on any Tor marketplace account than you can afford to lose. Exit scams happen, eventually, to almost every operator. Withdraw frequently.

Order funds enter a 2-of-3 multisig address that requires signatures from two of three parties (buyer, vendor and operator) to spend. A normal confirm-and-release is a two-signature spend by buyer and operator. A dispute decision is a two-signature spend by operator and whichever party prevailed. The vendor can’t pull funds out unilaterally; the operator can’t either, without one of the other parties’ signatures.

Most disputes close within a few days. A moderator pair reads PGP-signed evidence from both sides and decides who keeps the funds. Complex cases (cross-border shipments, vendor non-response) can run longer. The dispute window opens automatically if the buyer fails to confirm receipt within the configured period, typically a week or two for shipped goods.

Finalize-early (FE) is the opposite of escrow: the funds release to the vendor immediately on order placement, before the package ships. FE is a per-vendor permission granted by the operator on the basis of historical performance, not something a vendor can request from you. A vendor without operator-granted FE asking you to “finalize manually” is asking you to waive your dispute leverage. Decline and pick a different vendor.

For browsing and small orders, no. For encrypting your shipping address so the operator never sees plaintext, yes. Every serious vendor expects PGP-encrypted addresses. The walkthrough has the setup steps. The short version: import the vendor’s public key from their profile, encrypt your address with it, paste the encrypted block into the order notes.

Try a different mirror. If none of the three load, the operator is most likely in the middle of a rotation or under unusually heavy pressure, wait an hour, check Dread for an updated signed post. Don’t accept Nexus links surfaced in Telegram or chat groups during outages; phishing clones do their best work when the real marketplace is unavailable.

Three things, mostly. (1) Native Litecoin acceptance, rare in this segment, most markets stopped at BTC and XMR. (2) Three concurrent mirrors instead of one or two, better DDoS resilience. (3) Fingerprint-embedded login captcha, harder for phishing clones to fake the captcha than to fake the rest of the UI. Other markets do one or two of these; Nexus does all three.

Vendor applications are gated by the operator, not open. The application requires a PGP-signed introduction, references where applicable, and a track record on the operator’s preferred forum (Dread). New vendors run in escrow-only mode by default and earn finalize-early eligibility on the basis of clean order history.